MySpace: Lessons from the Last Track
What’s your favorite social media site? Maybe it’s Snapchat — short-term satisfaction where friendships are built on a foundation of quick pics and easily, accessible humor. Maybe it’s Facebook — a multi-layered, relationship-filled, application-driven world that you can tailor to your preferred social media experience. Or maybe it’s Instagram — a world of infinite design possibilities in which you can create a social media presence that is felt, seen, and experienced by millions around the world.
All of these sites are highly popular today depending on which age group or demographic you ask, but one site that has been left behind within the changing of the decade is the once ultra-powerful music-social connection conglomerate, Myspace! It’s crazy to think that a social media platform that was the largest on the internet from 2005 to 2008 is only brought up for memes and nostalgia’s sake despite remaining an active, retooled platform. Millions of inactive users paint a bleak picture for MySpace, but the site has had a critical impact on the progression of social media since its inception at the turn of the century.
100 Million Users per month! That’s how much traffic MySpace was generating at the height of its popularity. So how did this site become as popular as it did in an age where social media hype was at more of a premium compared to today’s standards?
MySpace’s birth actually came from the minds at a slightly older social media platform, Friendster. This site was run through the eUniverse company, and a few eUniverse employees saw the potential of Friendster’s social networking capabilities and decided to take this potential in a different direction. Partnering with ColdFusion, a rapid web-application development platform that provided the project with financial power, human resources, and server capacity, and headed by eUniverse founder Brad Greenspan, MySpace was officially born with the first users being the aforementioned eUniverse employees and with the shots being called by co-founders Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson (later known as Tom from MySpace).
Soon, MySpace had 20 million users and was involved in one of the largest internet purchases at the time — News Corporation shelled out $580 million for the site in July of 2005. It grew in popularity as users enjoyed networking with their friends in fun, trendy ways — Top Friends rankings built friendships and burnt bridges, while personal quizzes created trends for your followers to take part in and provided a basis for the ever-popular Buzzfeed Quizzes of today’s Facebook generation. In addition, MySpace’s creative team made several smart partnerships that allowed users to discover new, exciting applications on its network such Zynga, RockYou, Photobucket, and a powerful platform that outlasted it to the nth degree, Youtube.
This ability to host several applications while providing its own attractive networking features is a blueprint that Facebook has used to remain relevant since its inception in the early 2000s, albeit to a more effective degree than MySpace. Facebook has even used this application-friendly and self-sufficient outline to further diversify the platforms it owns, such as the constant redesign of the Instagram interface. But one of the most important features that MySpace offered was a safe space for anarchic self-expression fit for millions of adolescents and youthful adult misfits in desperate need for a place to call home in the age of the internet. This sentiment influenced the emergence of sites such as Tumblr, Reddit, and — ironically enough — Medium, though this point of view was not shared by other popular platforms (i.e. Facebook that actively works to provide content boundaries for its users).
But MySpace’s biggest contribution in its time at the top of the social media sphere is its connection and promotion of music, especially for artists looking to gain needed notoriety. Shortly after being sold to News Corporation, MySpace launched MySpace Records with the purpose of bringing unknown onto MySpace Music. Artists were ecstatic — they could now upload their content, from singles to full albums, into the MySpace world, and become famous — no, seriously! The list of artists who got their start thanks to MySpace is hard to believe: Paramore, Arctic Monkeys, Katy Perry, Colbie Caillat, Sean Kingston, 3OH!3, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg; it’s reported that over eight million artists have found their start on MySpace since its inception. Additionally, MySpace became a platform for black artists looking to distribute their music and create a strong fanbase in a world where there music was not always appreciated enough by larger record companies to get the funds they needed for such an enterprise. For example, Soulja Boy became an overnight sensation thanks to the collaboration between MySpace and Youtube. Social media platforms that have preceded MySpace have taken this effective music-connection strategy and ran with it, as we can see with the artists promoting and creating their brand every day on Facebook and Instagram. In fact, one of the largest social media trends of the day, Spotify, has created a multi-billion dollar platform based on this successful MySpace concept.
MySpace’s relevance in the social media sphere has steadily declined since 2011. Its constant retooling and shifting corporate ownership paints a picture of a platform that no longer has a niche to popularize in the current social media sphere. Despite its decline, MySpace is still as relevant as ever thanks to the innovations it helped drive from the very start. MySpace helped popularize the notion that social networking was for more than just surface connection and content sharing, created a fast-track to relevancy for third-party applications looking to find a wider audience, and single-handedly fostered an environment in which artists could find footing in their careers without having powerful, record label connections from the start. Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, Spotify, and content creators of the social media sphere all owe their innovative existences to the risks that MySpace was willing to take in the dawn of the era of social media.
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